Transformations

Thinking Through Feminism

Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil, Maureen Mcneil, Beverley Skeggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134599653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With contributions from some of the most important current feminist thinkers, Transformations traces both the shifts in thinking that have allowed feminism to arrive at its present point, and the way that feminist agendas have progressed in line with wider social developments.

A thorough reassessment of feminism's place in contemporary life, the authors engage in current debates as diverse as globalization, technoscience, embodiment and performativity, taking feminism in fresh directions, mapping new territory and suggesting alternative possibilities.

Part I

The rhetorical affects of feminism

Introduction

Beverley Skeggs

In this section the basic tenets of feminism which are sometimes taken for granted – about justice, the personal, activism and morality – are being questioned. Simultaneously attempts are made to formulate new versions of affectivity and to think about how feminist subjects are being produced. All the authors in this section explore how the grammar for contemporary political claims-making is being forged. Particular attention is paid to how feminist subjects are being produced through different rhetorical strategies. Whilst Lauren Berlant and Elspeth Probyn look at the rhetorical calls made and framed by the state in an attempt to interpellate the subject, Vikki Bell, Karyn Sandlos and Penelope Deutscher interrogate how the feminist subjects make their responses. Each chapter in this section shows how different rhetorical strategies are being deployed to generate a ‘politics of recognition’. This is a politics, which Fraser (1995) argues may not be helpful for feminism. She documents a shift from the politics of redistribution which predominated in the 1980s to a politics of recognition in the 1990s, in which political claims-making is forged through identity claims, rather than through the exposure of structural inequalities. These identity claims are based, she argues, on a desire to be recognised as someone (a particular category of person). This political claims-making is usually based on singular categorisations (that is, identity claims are usually linked to identity position). They are also invariably tied into a neo-liberal discourse of rights and assimilation.

The chapters in this section address, in their different ways, the limits to this contemporary political formation. But, they also show, because of the intimate link between recognition and concepts of personhood and identity, how difficult it is to escape from the neo-liberal conceptual framework. The challenge of this section is to envisage ways in which politics may involve thinking beyond and outside of bodies, intimacy and selves, beyond that which can be recognised, beyond appearances. Such politics, they argue, will have to including questioning motivation, investment, responsibility and desire and, in a sense, thinking beyond who we are, to where we should be, how and with whom. Thinking beyond the present is inherently difficult and this section attempts to rupture the paradigm of identity which dominates much current political thought and strategy.

The Western national public is now saturated with the personal (for example the explosion of emotions after the death of Princess Diana or the revelations of Clinton’s sexual activities). What does this mean for feminism? Has the personal become political in the way that feminists advocated? The rhetorical strategy of the ‘personal is political’ in early second-wave feminism was used to force an awareness of entitlement; it drew attention to the patterns of occupation of ‘the public’. It called into account the evaluation process by which women came to be associated with the irrational, the illegitimate, the insignificant and the private. Pateman (1988), for instance, showed how the social contract in the West was premised on the displacement of women from the public. Many feminists have shown citizenship to be a woman-excluding discourse. The various contributors to this section ask: what value does this rhetorical division between private and public hold? The chapters ask: How can we know what is personal? What designates personal space? What is a ‘public space’? Is it the bourgeois public sphere as described by Habermas (1996) and taken up by some feminists? Is it the space of appearances identified by Arendt (Landes 1998)? Is it a space to which only some have access, through, for example, the regulation of citizenship? Is it the state? Recognition claims fragment calls for citizenship into different variants (sexual, intimate, dead, diva: Berlant 1997). Nevertheless, still only some groups can be/go public, whilst others (for instance, gay men) are legislated as always public. Privacy has been associated with some groups of women. Yet, some groups of women are forced to come under public scrutiny (via reproduction, mothering practices and even sleeping arrangement – monitored in the UK by the Department of Social Security), whilst others can claim their practices as inscrutable, intimate and private. These differences in the scripting of intimacy problematise the universal promotion of the revelation of intimacy which has recently now been used to make political claims in the West/North.

The first three contributors to this section, Berlant, Probyn and Bell, explore how ‘the wounded attachment’ identified by Brown (1995) and developed from Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, energises a particular feminist politics which focuses on itself and celebrates misery. The concept of wounded attachment draws attention to the belief that the experience of pain, hurt and oppression provides greater epistemological authority. Berlant shows how ressentiment has enabled the development of identity politics which generates ‘a literacy program in the alphabet of that pain’. Showing how concepts of privacy and national attachment have been forged from a limited understanding of (specifically heterosexual) women’s pain, she argues that this has enabled the development of a particular national formation in which the currency of distress, hurt and pain are the means by which groups make claims for recognition. This produces a political terrain which is increasingly figured through moralism. The emphasis on wounding and pain as a sign of injustice provides an unreliable basis for justice claims. This is because only some groups can articulate their identities with reference to wounds and pain (and only some would want to do so). This also leads to a relativist collapse within the alphabet of pain through which major forms of distress and death, such as the Holocaust, are equated to narratives of individual personal trauma. The connections that are made across pain can deny and evade issues of power. We thus need a way of discriminating amongst different claims. Even more importantly, we need to understand how particular forms of citizenship, of public participation and of personal understanding are being forged through claims about wounds and pain, thereby limiting understandings of how everyday suffering is actually lived. The currency of distress has led to a displacement whereby awareness of everyday structural adversity on a daily basis is eclipsed by the accounts of exceptional, personal, traumatic pain. Media companies have not been slow to capitalise on this trend (for example Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer and Ricky Lake).

Gaining recognition through wound claims has become a compelling cultural strategy, so that telling and testifying become the modes through which national allegiance is forged. There are echoes of this process in the Australian attempts at reconciliation. Stories which were previously hidden, such as the accounts of forced adoption of Aboriginal children, of forced slave labour and of the effective genocidal eradication of substantial numbers of Aboriginal peoples, have led to state calls for reconciliation. In an outline of the public and personal responses to reconciliation, Probyn shows how the Australian national media attempted to produce a form of national sentimentality. She shows how this has made it difficult for feminists to respond. Probyn is uneasy about the unacknowledged disjuncture between an identity politics (feminism) which has been, to some extent, forged out of ‘speaking’ pain (for example, consciousness raising was predicated on the possibility of speaking about shared experiences of oppression), and the systematic eradication of whole groups of people by the state. Probyn asks: how can a politics forged out of relative privilege contend with such violence? She suggests that feminist thinking may not be up to the task of addressing such disjunctures. Yet Probyn makes us think through how we can use the limited tools that are available to us. This she argues, may not involve making a connection but is, rather, about recognising the limits of connection and thinking through disconnections. Assuming that connections can always be made, she argues, is a form of epistemological arrogance: it assumes that equivalence can be generated. She warns that: differences will not disappear if feminists do not pay attention to them (class and ‘race’ differences being her examples here).

Probyn (like Berlant) shows that relativising pain, as Berlant critiques, is clearly problematic. The experience of shame, she contends, may be a form of recognising the limits of our responses. It may entail an affective recognition of the lack of commonality produced as a bodily affect. Probyn’s chapter is an acknowledgement of the struggles and difficulties involved in knowledge production, which urges caution and circumspection. Telling stories of pain has been very important to the forging of a feminist politics but the limitations of such practices must also be recognised. Probyn calls for forms of politics forged through struggle, not around identity.

Vikki Bell also takes up the theme of ressentiment as the impulse to feminist politics. She argues that feminism does move beyond and outside of the boundaries marked by ressentiment. She shows how alliances and disconnections can be formed within this. In considering the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright, she distinguishes between the rhetorical calls made by feminism through ressentiment – ‘the telling of pain’ and the empirical impossibility of making connections. She shows how de Beauvoir invokes parallels to race relations in thinking through the figure of woman. Her connections are made through particular rhetorical and heuristic devices. Bell notes the constructing of all the women as white and of all the men as black.

Taking a rather different tack, Karyn Sandlos asks how feminists ‘brand’ political struggles in order to generate identifications and commitment. She explores the struggle over visual images, in which they are seen to hold the ‘grammar of indisputable knowledge’. She shows how the visual image of Gerri Santoro (a woman whose body was found after an illegal and fatal abortion in the USA in the 1970s) was deployed in political claims-making. She also asks who owns, circulates and has rights over the images used in political struggle. Outlining the battles over the visual representation of dead women and dead foetuses, she shows how forms of citizenship and personhood are generated. Acknowledging that personal outrage is necessary for mobilisation, she shows how central time is to the consolidation and condensing of moral positions. Drawing on focus-group discussions Sandlos draws attention to the significant differences between the visually rhetorical and the empirical. Women activists have very different relationships to this particular image, and these differences, she argues, represent generational changes in feminism. Sandlos points to the need for continual struggle, for careful use of the visual, and for recognition of the limits and the often unforeseen consequences of mobilisation.

Recent feminist research has shown how struggles for entitlement within the law can produce pathology and readability as the law encompasses new forms into its vocabulary (Bower 1997). So, for example, the foetus has become in many Western countries a body, a person, a citizen, through the process of making visible and legal. While the sedimentation and ossification of certain categories has been necessary to feminist mobilisation around rights, this has not always had positive consequences. For this reason, many feminists have become wary of mobilising around rights claims.

Despite this feminist circumspection, Luce Irigaray has not been hesitant in making such claims. In this section, Penelope Deutscher explores how Irigaray questions the basis for a politics of recognition (which has been the focus of much feminist struggle). Related to this, Irigaray argues that sexual difference cannot be recognised in such claims. Deutscher shows how Irigaray sets up a paradoxical call for sexuate rights in order to make us recognise what we want to displace. Irigaray’s call involves a particular form of ethics that makes us recognise that which cannot be recognised. Two strategies are central to this manoeuvre. The first is the use of rhetorical play through the re-metaphorising of sexual difference; the second is the use of the performative to create such a rhetorical move. The first shows us how all institutional recognition retroactively constitutes the conditions of its own possibility, showing us that rights can never be legitimated. It makes us question the authority of the legitimating agency (for example the constitution). (Of course, this does presuppose that the country in question actually has a constitution.) The second shows that the claim for sexuate rights (for example virginity as a right) works as a form of illocutionary performativity in which the claim has already accomplished an act regardless of its consequences. Irigaray’s rhetorical—performative gesture draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the ethics of recognition and to the constrained nature of speech. Deutscher labels this strategy ‘post-deconstructive ethics’, an ethics that constantly problematises the present and questions performative claims. In this way, Deutscher advocates a movement from a politics of recognition to a politics of performative rights. There is, of course, the further question about whether the call to performative rights is also framed by the ability to authorise performative speech so that it can be heard. In this sense, performativity always involves power, authority and legitimation.

All of the chapters in this section engage with political claims and consider how they can be made and heard. They show how the state frames the terms of many of the debates, through the interpretation of feelings, the incorporation of challenges, and the articulation of legal claims in the construction of citizenship. The contributors also demonstrate the power of the neo-liberal framework of advanced capitalism to shape political discourses. As Bourdieu (1985) argues, theory produces the effects it names. These authors demonstrate how justice may be realised or blocked through performative acts, through the zoning of social spaces and through the limits of recognition. They illustrate the deployment of rhetorical techniques, exploring the consequences of and necessity for different moves. The contributors to this section are, in many respects, sensitive to the different rhetorical ploys which link the subjective to the social in contemporary feminist politics. Hence, generally they advocate forms of political caution and constraint which recognise limits, differences, power and, in some cases, the impossibility of making connections. This is rather different from the universal optimism which characterised much early second-wave feminism, which rhetorically deployed ‘sisterhood’ and worked rather straightforwardly on building alliances. These authors are aware that each recognition claim may precipitate a counter-claim. They also acknowledge that there are groups who, through processes of disidentification, become excluded from political consideration (Skeggs 1997; Fraser, M. 1999).

Attention to rhetorical strategies may expose gestures made for the sake of alliance which pretend to include, whilst excluding. Differences are frequently invoked in rhetorical forms (often as a mantra) whilst racism and class inequality not only remain intact, but are reproduced...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors' preface
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction Thinking through feminism
• Part I The rhetorical affects of feminism
• Part II Boundaries and connections
• Part III Knowledges and disciplines
• 4 Subject matters
• Index